Part One: Judi Bari Didn't Bomb Herself: Earth First! & the Timber Wars

Margaret talks with Gare about the labor organizer who tried to bring loggers and environmentalists together to save the redwoods and had to survive a car bomb to do it.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff,
the podcast that does what it says it does. I'm
your host, Margaret Kiljoy with me today is the ever
joyful Garrison Davis. Who. Okay, I know, an adjective again,
I don't know, Well, what adjective would you pick besides

(00:20):
journalist and podcaster of the showcase, those are the two
worst adjectives imagineable? So anything besides journalist and podcaster? Yeah,
I don't know, Uh, mysterious Okay, the mysterious Garrison Davis
or wait is it more mysterious if it's gare, Yeah,
slightly more. I don't know. I know you can do

(00:43):
probably neurodivergent. I don't know. There's a lot of a
lot of a lot of adjectives that are not journalists
or podcaster. I once had a stress dream. I probably
have said this on here before. I once had a
stress dream where I had to tell a crowd of
people what I did for a living podcaster terrified. But
you could also say author and authors like that's respectable. Yeah,

(01:06):
that's true. Here's that I have one sibling and he
is a motherfucking oncologist. So going to any function where
it's like, what are you doing? I'm like, amen, hang
haf podcast it's horrifying. Yeah, but what if on College
has done for anyone lately? Wait? No, no, I can
come up with a bunch of things. Never mind, but

(01:28):
they haven't cured cancer. Unlike podcasting. We cured that is.
That is my brother's full time job. He is a
He's a physician, scientist who's working to cure cancer. So
I am a hack. Yeah. Well we're all packs here. Um,
that's Sophie that you're listening to our producer, Sophie, how

(01:51):
are you doing? Oh I'm great. Garrison's here to roast
us all I know. I'm so excited. Ian as our
audio engineer on Woman wrote our theme music. So Garrison Davis,
the mysterious Garrison Davis. Have you ever heard of forests? Yeah?
Ever hear of this thing called off forest, the place

(02:14):
with a lot of trees. Yeah, yeah, I'm I'm mostly familiar.
I mean I grew up in the Prairies, so there
was not a forest any anywhere near me. But then
I moved to Oregon and there's definitely definitely saw a
few forests there. You switched colors in your magic The
Gathering deck. Sure, I've never played Magic the Gathering, but sure. Okay, Well,

(02:38):
what's your take on forests? Pro? Anti? Cool? Cool? Yeah? Okay, God,
this would be a rough one if you were anti,
because today we're going to talk about redwood trees and
we're gonna be talking about one woman who worked so
hard to save them that someone put a bomb in
her car. She survives the bombing. Spoiler alert. Okay, that's good. Yeah,

(02:59):
yeah I was. It's like, are we doomsdaying? Like right
up top, magpie? Oh now she survives. Yeah, you can't
keep her down. Well, this is all going to tie
in terribly at the end. Okay. Today we're going to
talk about Earth First, Judy Barry, the creation of the
Headwaters Forest Reserve in northern California, the fight to save
the Red Waters, more more in general, and we're gonna

(03:22):
be talking about how nothing scares the government incorporations more
than environmentalists discovering class consciousness and feminism. And that's where
we're gonna talk about, very very cool, very on topic,
very timely. Yeah. Yeah, I had to. I bumped this
in the Chico Mendez episode up from my like infinite

(03:43):
scroll like list of available topics after Tortuguita died in Atlanta,
I was like, you know, it's time to talk about
some environmentalists. It's it's kind of interesting. As we're going
through like a like a nineties and early two thousands
nostalgia cycle, we're also getting the same types of environmentalists
like actions and groups as the as the nineties end

(04:04):
early two thousands, which means that our next in this
tultorcycle will beat the Green Scare. Hey, you've got like
fifteen years between what happened in this episode and what
the Green Scare. That's good. That's good. Yeah, because this
is the stuff that's like right before my time, whereas
green Scare is like firmly my time. Sure, sure, but yeah,

(04:25):
So I's talk about the redwoods first, because the redwoods
are fucking amazing. They are dropped dead, gorgeous, They are
god tier trees. And if you ever want yet another reason,
there's a lot of these. But if you're like just
looking for an extra item on your list of just
wanting to feel in your gut, Europeans showing up in

(04:47):
North America is one of the worst things that's ever
happened in the history of ever. Go walk among the
redwoods and then read about how few of them are left.
The tallest tree in the world and the tallest living
thing in the world, is a redwood named Hyperion, which
I don't know what it calls itself, but that's what
people call it. It is three hundred and eighty feet tall.

(05:08):
You can't go visit it because people trying to visit
it are fucking it up and just like fucking up
the ecosystem around it. Like even like obviously some people
are going and like trashing the place, but even just
like the number of people who would want to go
visit this trampling the root systems and all of that
bad idea. Don't go visit Hyperion. Be happy it's there.

(05:29):
It's three and eighty feet tall, It's only got twelve
feet of roots because forests are not built from individual trees.
There's a metaphor in here somewhere. I'll never be able
to come up with it, but I'm sure come up
with it on their own, which is actually one of
the things that happens a lot and logging as people
are like, we didn't clear cut, we left like ten
trees in an acre, and then like all the trees

(05:49):
are like, hey, I was kind of reliance on an
entire interwoven series of trees to block the wind and
provide nutrients and do all kinds of stuff, and then
they just like fall over. You know, it's it's it's
it's funny you mentioned that because some some of us
believe that most of what we call trees aren't actually
real trees, and that trees, real trees, are actually our mountains.

(06:15):
All all rock is actually ancient massive trees, and that
the world was covered in these huge trees. All all
mountains used to be massive trees that I got shot
that utterly just just desivated. So now we're left with
these weird stumps which are which are mountains, um, And
most of the trees that you see nowadays aren't like

(06:36):
actually real trees. Um. So yeah, you know, I actually
just recently went through and cut out a bunch of
conspiracy shit out of this episode. So thanks for thanks
for bringing the conspiracy right back in. Always always happy
to help. So it would trees trees are like the
moss from in this basically yeah, basically yeah, yeah, So

(06:59):
I mean I would love to leave that now. These
are already big enough trees, Like I just don't need
bigger trees than these. These are fucking huge. No, look,
I'll I'll send you a message on signal, like, look
at this mountain. This mountain was was obviously a massive tree. Yeah,
I've sent it to you. Oh yeah, this is Devil's

(07:19):
whatever the fucking mesa and um southwest, which is actually
a tree, clearly a tree yep, uh okay. So Hyperion
is just a little baby, an upstart of a redwood,
only six hundred, eight hundred years old, not nearly as
old as this tree that you sent me a picture
of the Devil's Tower. Yeah. Yeah. The largest tree in

(07:41):
the world besides the mountains is also a redwood, is
a giant sequoia instead of a coastal redwood, just slightly
different species that grows in the Sierra Nevadas instead of
along the coast. It's been named General Sherman, and I
don't know how I feel about that. Yeah. It is
thirty six feet in diameter at the base. Bark is
about four foot thick to protect it from fire. Whoa, yeah,

(08:05):
sixty feet up. It's still fucking seventeen and a half
feet in diameter, like pretty big. Yeah, it doesn't bother
spitting out branches until it gets thirteen stories into the air.
Numbers don't do this tree justice. It's between two thousand,
three hundred and two thousand, seven hundred years old, and
they found redwoods up to three thousand, two hundred years older.

(08:26):
So that's before I was born. Oh really, yeah, I
know that a lot of listeners consider me to be
very old, but this tree is actually a little bit
older than me, even older than my parents. These are

(08:47):
not the biggest trees that I've ever existed. These are
the biggest trees that are left. I mean, yeah, we
just talked about the bountiins. Oh right, yeah, I mean
besides the fucking goddamn it. You know, I picked this
episode just for you, Okay. Anyway, Um, in the mid
nineteen forties, a redwood about twenty percent larger than General

(09:08):
Sherman was logged. In eighteen ninety seven, a Douglas fir
tree and Washington State was felled and it was four
hundred and sixty six feet tall. They measured it after
it fucking felt after they cut it down, and they
just turned it into lumber. The tallest fucking living thing
that Ah. Oh, that's so grim, I know, not even
like if I was to cut down a fucking this

(09:33):
is like killing a dragon and then instead of like
mounting the dragon like as like cool tax dermy or
like putting its skull over your gate. Yeah, it's like
grinding it up into dust and selling it as an
affordaisy act or something like. You could like you could
like fell the tree and like like like like um,
like drill it out and like make a series of
caves and places like inside the tree. And no you

(09:56):
just turned into like into like plywood or something. Yeah, lumber.
It's yeah, yeah, no, some of them get fucking turned
into like tepe and toothpicks and ship at various points. Yeah,
some of the largest trees in the world weren't even
killed by logging, because you know, it's worse than killing
a tree by cutting it down and turning it into
fucking random two by fours. There was a tree called

(10:18):
Mother of the Forest. It was twenty five hundred years old,
and in eighteen fifty five people stripped sixty tons of
its bark off, shipped it to New York City and
set it up as like an empty shell of the
tree as a like look how big the trees are
out west. What why would you do that? I got nothing.

(10:43):
It's like that's like if you like skin somebody and
ship their skin across the country, like look at this
verse it Yeah, yeah, not the best move that. There's
not really a lot of positive moves that the colonize enforce,
that is, the United States is perpetrated onto this land.
But yeah, especially to trees. I know there are also

(11:07):
albino redwoods. Have you ever seen an albino redwood? Oh?
I don't know if I have. Let me let me see. Okay,
they are white needled who they fucking rule. There's one
in a park just north of Santa Cruz that you
can visit. They're not like they look like like like
elven trees from Middle Earth or something. Yeah, that's what. Yeah,

(11:31):
they look like you would like find like you would
like if you're walking through you would find like gladriol,
just like like strolling through these woods. That's wild, so
they don't grow tall. They rely on nutrients from the
root systems the neighbors. They used to get called parasites
because humans are not always very intelligent. Now people realize

(11:53):
that actually, like they're useful to the forest. But of
course even if they weren't useful. I doubt the other
trees or you damn anyway, Yeah, yeah, yeah, they're better
at absorbing toxic metals than other redwoods, and so they
sort of serve as like kind of an organ of
the forest, like a liver, kidney or whatever. I don't
know anything about the organs in the human body, and

(12:13):
it's supported by the others, and it absorbs a bunch
of bad stuff from the soil. Anyway, Old growth forest,
that is, forest that hasn't been fucking butchered, is really
important for biodiversity and for a million different reasons. They
store carbon better worldwide. Two as of two thousand and nine,
twenty one percent of old growth remains. That number has

(12:35):
not gone up. That is an interesting thing to know
about remains numbers, is that they can't go up. Yeah,
you'll be shocked to know this. That Europe has wrecked
more of its forest than anywhere else. One University of
Michigan study says that sixteenth since the year sixteen hundred,
ninety percent of the virgin forests in the lower forty
eight states have been cleared. There used to be two

(12:58):
million acres of coastal redwoods estimates in nineteen ninety two.
So like, all my numbers on this shit are like old,
so the numbers haven't gotten better. In nineteen ninety two,
five percent of that old growth remained. In twenty twenty one,
wildfire killed ten to fourteen percent of the remaining redwoods.
And it's worth knowing because people are like, oh, that's natural.

(13:18):
Well not fire is natural. It's a natural part of
the ecosystem. There's a reason that giant sequoias have the
really thick bark and all of this. Redwoods are used
to a fire ecology, at ecology that is improved by fire.
But these fires are particularly hot and bad because of
two things, both of which are the fault of colonization. First,
fire management procedures that suppress all fires cause a build

(13:40):
up of debris that causes incredibly hot fires. And second,
global fucking warming. And then a third climate change impact
on the redwoods that I had no idea about until
I started doing this research. A lot of that other
stuff about fire ecology, I knew they're able to grow
that tall because of fog. At the tops of mountains.
Redwoods don't grow was tall down in the valleys. They

(14:01):
grow taller because it's hard for them to get water
up to the top of the trees because they're so
fucking massive, So they absorb water through. Yeah, they absorb
water through their bark in the form of fog. Well, yeah,
that's that's super interesting. Yeah, they're magical. Like drinking through
fog is such a such an intriguing little process. Yeah, yeah, no,

(14:25):
I you know, I it was when I went out
to the West Coast I started doing forest defense and
things like that. It took me a while to appreciate
the beauty of the East Coast after hanging out on
the West Coast for a long time. Yeah. Yeah, now
they're they're very very different forests. That was like the
first time, first time I traveled to the East Coast
and was walking through the forest in Georgia. It's very

(14:48):
very different feeling than than the ones out out on
the West coast. Yeah, it's worth finding. There are tiny
scraps of old growth on the East coast. Um they're
much harder to come by. Their there's a grove kind
of near Asheville, like forty five minutes or maybe an
hour or two, I can't remember. Away from Asheville, North Carolina,

(15:10):
there's some like old growth swamps, like deep in the
swamps in eastern North Carolina. It's worth seeing that stuff
because it's worth seeing. It's not these like towering giants,
but there are these like beautiful old trees, and seeing
a like fully developed a climax ecosystem is worth doing.
Anyone who's listening, it's worth seeing a climax ecosystem. So

(15:33):
let's talk about some of the people who fought against
logging of redwoods, and specifically, let's talk about Judy Berry.
Have you heard of Judy Berry? The name doesn't ring
a bell. Okay, well, I'm excited to tell you about
the past couple of weeks have been like Moral Complexity
weeks here on whatever the show I'm on talking on

(15:55):
People Did Cool Stuff? Hosted by One Market Kildroy. Yeah okay,
wait wait yeah? Is it? Is it cool people that
did cool stuff? Or or cool who did cool stuff? Who? Okay? Yeah,
just checking on the auto video Goo is on today.
I forget what version of it. The title was mentioned,
but it was not what it was like cool stuff
that people did buy things things? Yeah, yeah, that's it,

(16:21):
Thank you so much. Well, this is not Moral Complexity week.
I mean I know, I know, I was like kept
waiting for the other shoot at Trump whenever I'm reading
biographies these days, just like waiting for the like and
then as a hobby they kicked their dog or whatever,
you know. I mean, I think the rule that we

(16:42):
have now is that if it's a man, you just
go to the very end to make sure. Yeah, totally,
like you're not going to find that like last week.
Yeah yeah, but we're now back in ontologically good territory. Yes, yeah,
I feel on complex. I mean, okay, no one is
fucking pert. And there were a lot of people that
Judy Berry rubbed the wrong way. I mean, obviously there's

(17:04):
some people that Judy Barry rubbed the wrong way intentionally
because she was an activist. Yeah, but no, no hidden demons.
Judith Beatrice Barry Judy Berry. She was born on November seventh,
nineteen forty nine, in Silver Spring, Maryland, into a middle class,
progressive family in the suburbs. Her mother, Ruth Arenson Barry,

(17:28):
was a Jewish mathematician, the first woman to get a
PhD from in mathematics from John Hopkins University, and she's
famous enough for contributions to the field that she has
a Wikipedia page, not for being the first woman to graduate,
but just like literally for the shit that she did
for math. Cool. Judy was closer to her father, an
Italian jeweler. She once said, I'm my father's son. This

(17:50):
is not me making a statement about Judy's gender. It's
just that's saying, like, hey, people have always been okay
with being a little bit flexible and how they talk
about themselves. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because it was the nineteen forties,
her parents were apparently seen a sort of a mixed
race couple, Italian and Jewish. She was one of three daughters.
She grew up. She went to the University of Maryland
at the peak of the Vietnam War, and she spent

(18:12):
five years there without graduating, which is close to my
own heart as a college dropout. In her bio on
one of her books, she says that while she was
in college, she majored in anti Vietnam War rioting. Yeah. Based, Yeah.
Eventually she dropped out. She started working at a grocery store.

(18:34):
Soon enough, she organized a union there and got a
black belt in karate off on the side. Wait really, yeah,
this was like like the sixties, Yeah, probably early seventies.
At this point in the seventies. Still still, that's kind
of like before the big karate wave hit the United States.
I believe that to be the case. I don't know
as much about when it hit. I was thinking karate

(18:56):
is a little bit like old school compared to I
guess so now nowadays like taekwondo or yeah, Brazilian jiu jitsu,
and well, Brazilian jiu jitsu is actually cool though. Oh.
I mean, I think martial arts are cool and a
good way to study how to handle your body and things.
But I guess I don't know as much about It's fine,

(19:17):
It's fine. Yeah. I studied BJJ for a little while
and then I, um was blood choked out. And then
I was like, you know, this is a shitty hobby.
This is a hobby where I go unconscious. I'm good,
I'm out. I also got like, um, kickboxing can do
that without having to pay. Yeah, And like I was
like sparring during kickboxing and like got knocked unconscious with
like a fucking I remember it was a kick or

(19:38):
a punch. I was knocked unconscious and I was like, yeah,
this isn't this isn't my things. Other people can do
this I tried to get. I was doing Mui Tai
last year, and I would have continued longer, but I
just found the bus route that takes me from my
house to the muay Thai place was always like fifteen
minutes late, so I could I could never shop on time.

(20:01):
Even if I even if I planned beforehand to like compensate,
it would still result to me being late. So I
just like, whatever this is, this is obviously not meant
to be. I will do muy tie at another place
at another time. It's fine. Yeah, totally. All the while,
she's also playing fiddle she has since elementary. Yeah, no,

(20:21):
she's just great. Um. She probably started off calling at
violin um because she learned in school, but yeah, she's
a fiddle player, yes, absolutely. And then she decided she
was going to work in the bulk mail facility at
the post office. As far as I can tell, it
went a little something like this. They were like, you
can't do that, you're a lady, and she was like, hey,

(20:41):
why not, and they were like, well, you have to
move seventy pound bags all day, and so she was
like test me, and so she just proved she could
shoulder seventy pound bags all day. Well, I think that
that is cool, but this does actually reach our first
mortal complexity, the fact that she's a FED So I
don't know, No, a Kevin glits all postal workers. It

(21:12):
does not. Anyway, she's working at a male facility. Maybe
this will redeem her, but maybe it won't from your
point of view, right because as a postal union the
same as a copy union, she moves seventy pound bags

(21:33):
all day. I'm not a small person, and earlier this
week I had to move to seventy pound boxes full
of shelves and I couldn't move my head for like
a day afterwards. Yeah. No, that's like, that's like half
the way. Yeah, that would not be fun. Yeah. While
she's there, she starts a worker's newspaper for the employees,

(21:55):
and then she leads a wildcat strike for better working
conditions and wins nice Somewhere along the way, I think
at an activist conference, she meets a nice boy named
Mike Sweeney, who was probably part of an urban guerrilla
maoist movement called vince Ramos, and the two of them
moved to Sonoma County, California, just north of the Bay.

(22:16):
They get married they have two daughters, and she gets
involved in organizing opposition to US involvement in Central America.
But then by nineteen eighty eight, her and Mike, her husband,
they have an amicable divorce. And yeah, a lot of
people like to argue about how this divorce went, because

(22:37):
people like to argue about the personal lives of women.
But they stay co parents, they stay for a long
time living on the same land project, and they're just
not dating anymore. And she starts working as a carpenter,
and so early at this point, she's kind of like
living the hippie dream. She's moved to California, she's stayed radical,
she's living in nature. But her work as a carpenter
gets her questioning what's going on because she's building houses

(23:00):
for rich people out of ancient redwood trees. H yeah. Yeah.
So nineteen eighty eight, she starts working with a little
group called Earth First. And the most important thing to
know about Earth First is that it's really funny to
type because the exclamation mark is part of the name.
They insist every yes, yeah, and and it fucks up

(23:23):
anything you write about them because your computer is going
to auto capitalize the next letter yes it makes it
makes writing sentences impossible. This this was something I first
dealt with when I was writing my Earth First episodes
back in like twenty twenty one. Yeah, yeah, very very
challenging to write Earth First. It is, and I think

(23:44):
it want they want us to say earth First every
time we say their name. Yes, um, so let's talk
about Earth First. Love. You could change it to my
Earth First T shirt. Yeah. Earth First is a decentralized
direct action environmentalist movement that's been around since nineteen eighty,

(24:06):
so it is forty three years old at this point,
which is a very long time for a direct action
group just fucking staying in it. It's sort of a
non group. It has some formal and mostly informal structure.
Its motto is no compromising defense of the Earth. And

(24:26):
I've done a lot of work with or as Earth
First over the years. So I'm going to be more
biased in this episode than usual. I'm always biased, but
listener beware, I'm going to do my best to be
aware of my own biases and work around them as always,
and as always I will fail. For decades, environmentalists have
been tending towards policies of compromise, basically, okay, fine, you

(24:50):
can blow up these three mountains as long as you
let these two mountains not get blown up, and or
as you would call them, trees tree stops. Yeah, I
mean it is a very large tree stumps to preserve
the last of the great trees that we have on Earth. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
And there's a couple problems with this policy. One it
buys into a conspiracy. But let's pretend that parts not

(25:11):
part of it. There's a couple of problems. One, it
means you're letting people blow up mountains when you say
it's okay if you blow up these three as long
as you save these two, or you can blow up
one as long as you save four, whatever, fucking however
you math it, you're letting people blow up mountains. That's
a little bit awkward. I know most of this episode
is about trees, but I live in the Appalachian Mountains
that Earth first fights against people literally blowing up the mountains. Well,

(25:34):
and we've already discussed they're the same things, right, right, exactly, Yeah,
it's just a different um vernacular tree mountain whatever. They're older. Like,
have you ever gotten like petrified tree bark? You know,
like tree bark, that's like is so old that it's
that it is basically turned into rock. That is that
that is mountains. That mountains are giant petrified tree stumps. Yeah,

(25:58):
and so does that mean that Sandy beaches are disintegrated
mountain sorry trees. Oh wow, that does make going to
the beach much much darker. Yeah, yeah, that's okay. So compromise,
you're letting people blow up mountains. And second of all,
it's a losing game. We can't make old growth forests,
we can't make mountains. Every victory we have is temporary,

(26:22):
every loss we have is final. So compromise methodology is
a losing one from an environmentalist point of view. Even
let them blow up three mountains out of five. Ten
years later they want to blow up the last two,
so you compromise again, they only blow up one. Pretty
soon you don't have any mountains. And that's what the
founders of Earth First We're looking to counter compromise. But

(26:42):
you know it is a compromise. Garrison selling your soul
to the products and services that support this podcast. That's right,
here's some advertisers. Well, the fact that we have us
a little bit of our dignity on that one AD
break means that we can continue doing the show now,

(27:05):
So we're fine until the next AD break. So we
will deal. We'll deal with the next one when it comes.
We have this this small, small victory here. Yeah exactly. Yeah. Yeah.
Um if every time we cut to an AD break,
like I don't know, like literally pulled a piece of
my soul out, then that I can never recover. I
mean I would have a different attitude about I mean,

(27:26):
Margaret that that is kind of what we do away. Yeah, okay,
but Earth First there's always there's no yeah. Sorry. Earth
First has always been into using or support supporting a
diversity of tactics, or, as it gets phrased in the movement,

(27:47):
every tool in the toolbox. In the beginning, they combine
civil disobedience, publicity stunts, legal work, and sabotage. Later this
is my interpretation of these of this. But later they
realize that strong surely but not ethically sabotage didn't really
fit within their framework, so they stopped doing sabotage. As
Earth First, a lot of sabotage just sort of happened

(28:09):
around them. Yeah, and they tended to think it was
cool because it tended to be pretty cool. It makes
sense civil disobedience is also illegal, or it isn't disobedience.
If you go to a civil disobedience and it's not illegal,
you're not going to a civil disobedience, but it's the
kind that you're expecting to get caught for, so you
can do it openly and you can talk about it. Sabotage.

(28:30):
You tend not to want to get caught. There's exceptions.
We'll talk about the Catholic workers some other time. The
other important thing about Earth first, that's I'm not going
to do that every time. That set it apart was
a belief in deep ecology, which there are arguments that
can be had about deep ecology, but I'm going to
sum it up as the idea that nature has value

(28:51):
for its own sake, not just from what it offers
to humanity. You can also call this sort of similar
concept biocentrism, and you'll find people emphasizing different words. Basically,
wilderness deserves to exist because it's wilderness, not just because
wilderness is better for humans than clear cuts, although that's
true too, Earth versus decentralized. Each group is autonomous from

(29:13):
the others, but there's still a recognizable, vibrant earth First culture,
complete with music and gatherings and camaraderie. And there's a
way that Earth First in the eighties gets talked about.
And I talked with some movement elders before I recorded
this episode. I actually don't usually necessarily talk to sort
of primary sources or whatever, because I usually try to

(29:35):
stick to topics about the nineteenth century, where everyone's been
dead for a hundred years, so I don't have to
get to like, I mean, Margaret, if you ever want
to talk to someone from the nineteenth century, you can
just call me. We we can do a say okay,
it's like that is that is totally possible. Okay, So
just as as if for future notice yeah no, I
now I have ideas for getting you to come on

(29:55):
one of my other podcasts in order to do an
interview with someone who's been dead for a while. Great. Yeah, yep.
So earth First start in the eighties, it had a
slightly different culture than it ended up developing into. It
was founded by a group of men, but pretty much
right away it became more than that. There's this media
conception of earth First from the eighties of like swaggering
macho white guys with cowboy hats, but there are women

(30:19):
at all levels of the organization pretty much right away.
One person I talked too, Yeah, Like, I talked to
this person who joined in nineteen eighty three, and she
joined because basically, like here, finally in an environmentalist group,
they're women in positions of power. And she was just
blown away by the work that women were doing and

(30:41):
the like degree to which that will let her actually
fucking have power. And why did they have power? Because one,
because strong women had paved the way, but also because
from the very beginning structurally, Earth First was more open
to women in other organizations because it was non hierarchical.
You don't have to prove yourself and put in like

(31:01):
years of bullshit in order to like move up a
ladder or whatever. Non hierarchy is cool. Here's where my
bias comes in. But this is the best I can
understand if they're literally reading about movements every week for
fucking past year and a little bit longer than that.
In the late eighties or the early around nineteen ninety,

(31:23):
there was an evolution in Earth First and some of
the founders left and they did their own thing. The
sort of like classic complaint of a leaving person would
be the tofu eating anarchists or you ruining the movement
or whatever, which is just funny because nineteen ninety is
like way the fuck before most people who imagine Tofu
eating anarchists, But we've always been here. The first tofu

(31:47):
factory in the Western world was started by a Japanese anarchist.
And I can't remember his name, And I'm just drilling
that fact. I'm dropping that fact and leaving it there
because I don't remember more than that off the top
of my head. That is still in fact that I
was completely unaware of. Yeah, I can't remember exactly. It
was nineteenth century a guy, early twentieth century. I don't

(32:08):
remember the details at all because this is not in
my script. It's the kind of thing I was planning
a cover one day. It's in my little Meat anecdotes
for later category. Okay, Earth first, it is evolving. It's
not like a revolution. It's not fundamentally changing the organization. Yeah,
there's like it becomes slightly more anarchistic. They move away

(32:29):
from using an American flag as a logo, but it
had been non hierarchical from the start. A lot of
their ideological you know, Founders had been involved in anarchisms
some degree or another, and they have this evolution and
they you know, kind of started off as like sort
of rednecks for wilderness. But it's like, I don't know
if they would have identified rednecks. But these are still

(32:50):
hural people with rural values. And I would contend that
real tree is popular with city queers because of the
rural queers from Earth First. That is mine. That is
a hill I will die on, unless someone presents me
with evidence contrary, which means it is not a hill
I will die on. But it is something that I
believe in is to my experience. And while we're at it,
there is a not small chance that the phrase woo

(33:12):
woo comes into English from Earth First from the eighties,
woo woo like magical thinking. Yeah huh, really yeah, it
is believed within Earth First circles that this comes from
Earth First. And I've tall that story in a second.
And if you try looking up the etymology of it,
people are like unknown eighties and so here's a group
of people who I know, and you can look at

(33:34):
old letters where they're using it in the Earth First
Journal in the late eighties early nineties. I didn't like
specifically scour the archives, but I found a specific letter
from ninety one and specifically okay, so woo woo meaning
like people who believe in new agy magic and shit. Yeah,
earth versus have been using it since the eighties. Is
part of a sort of internal cultural conflict, with people

(33:55):
attacking each other as like woo woo or identifying as
woo woo. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes sense. And one
version from a friend who was in Earth First in
the eighties was that someone decided that they declared themselves
a guru, named themselves shamon Wu, and people started making
fun of them by calling them woo woo, and it's
stuck ha. I am not certain if that is the

(34:19):
specific etymology, but I don't have a counter argument, and
I do know that they used it a lot to
talk shit on each other. And the first places I
always ran into it was in the woods. Interesting, and
so those are the two contributions of Earth First. That's
what I First has done well, fantastic, that's that's great

(34:42):
that they also had the first published interviews of a
mathematician who decided to send some bombs in the mail
so that's cool. Yeah, weird times that doing Moral complexity
week yet about Judy Barry. Okay. Earth First is not
a quote anarchist organization, but it is anarchistic. It is

(35:05):
radically democratic and autonomous. It is increasingly committed to intersectional values.
It has had many of those values since the start.
By the early aughts, when I got involved, there were
all women action camps and tree sets, and they were
from the very beginning trans inclusive. I wasn't out yet,
but one day I was visiting one of these camps.

(35:25):
Boys were allowed to visit during the day, and I've
always gone along better with women than men, so I
would always go over there and hang out during the
day for some weird reason. And one of the strongest
memories I have in all of this, and actually one
of the things that later kind of helped give me
the courage to come out, was a trans woman sitting
in a circle in the all women's action camp and
she's just crying with joy, and it was the first

(35:47):
time in her life she'd been accepted into a community
of women, and the other women in the circle were
crying too. So Earth First not without its issues, but
I'm just gonna say it is fucking cool and has
done a bunch of really fucking cool shit. And Judy
Berry was a part of all of this change, but
also just a part of the evolution of it. Later

(36:11):
people are like, she's the one who feminized earth First,
But she was one of the people who did that work,
and she was also one of the people who brought
class consciousness into it. And we're gonna be talking about that,
And so I'm not trying to take anything away from her,
but instead understand her as part of a community in
a movement of equals. Let's talk about her. The year
is nineteen eighty eight. Margaret Kiljoy is five years old.

(36:35):
Most of her listeners haven't been born. The Worldwide Web
is being considered as a thing that could be made.
An Internet link was made between the US and Europe.
The Soviet Union is starting to consider not existing. And
Judy Berry joined Earth First. How do you like that
dramatic transition? I worked really hard on that. That's good.

(36:56):
That's good. Yeah, really set in the scene here. Yeah.
As Judy puts it, quote, I was attracted to Earth
First because they were the only ones willing to put
their bodies in front of the bulldozers and chainsaws to
save the trees. They were also funny, irreverent, and they
played music, But it was the philosophy of Earth First
that ultimately won me over. This philosophy, known as biocentrism

(37:18):
or deep ecology, states that the earth is not just
here for human consumption. All species have a right to
exist for their own sake, and humans must learn to
live in balance with the needs of nature instead of
trying to mold nature to fit the wants of humans.
And so they formed North Coast earth First to protect
the redwoods. They often called themselves, I think informally Ecotopia
earth First, named after an utopian book called Ecotopia that's

(37:41):
sort of what if the Pacific Northwest is seated and
made a hippie utopia? Yeah, Like they kind kind of
carries over on to the Cascadia concept. Yea. They form
a chapter of the organization, and they also are consciously,
at least as Judie writes about it, they're conscious going
to try and make it more feminine, at least their chapter.

(38:04):
There's a lot a lot to be said in a
lot of directions about how hippies and how people in
general discuss like feminine versus masculine values. But for her
this means that she wants she wants the group to
be more collective. She describes it earth First at that
point was mostly I'm not quoting, but I'm paraphrasing. Earth
First at that point was mostly actions done by like
small affinity groups of five to ten people who would

(38:24):
plan and do an action and then like you know,
chain themselves to shit, sit in a tree, hang a banner,
spikes some trees. We'll talk more about that later, but
North Coast earth First envisioned itself as building a mass movement.
As she put it, there's no way that a few
isolated individuals, no matter how brave, can bring about the
massive social change necessary to save the planet. And I

(38:45):
agree with this. And the first thing she helped with
was blockading logging on public land near Kato Park, helping
save thousands of acres of forest which get added to
the nearby wilderness area. And even though this is an
episode about the timber Wars, we're not actually going to
talk as much about the blow by blow about like
the different the different campaigns and the different places that
they save and stuff like that, because there's so much

(39:06):
happening in this story, and we only have so long
to tell it. Most of the time tree sitting in
blockades and ship. The strategy isn't they'll never get past us,
We're going to blockade this forever, right, But instead the
tactic is we're going to slow them down while we
sue them in court, like while we prevent their ability

(39:28):
to do this at all. Because time and time again,
what would what would happen is a timber companies we'd
get sued. They'd be like doing some illegal logging or whatever,
and people would sue, but while it's all caught up
in court, they would just keep logging. Yeah, So then
at the end they're like, oh, well, I guess we
probably shouldn't have done that, but it wasn't illegal until
we lost and we already did it, and okay, and

(39:51):
there's only a lot of shit. Like some of the
campaigns that I worked on, they would just like go
and they would like cut down an old growth tree
that they weren't supposed to cut because is like not
technically a clear cut or whatever, and they'd sell the
tree for like I'm making these numbers up, they'd sell
the tree for a thousand dollars and they'd get like
a two hundred dollars fine for having cut the tree,
So it was just like actually financially worth it for

(40:11):
them to break the law in these ways. That's what
blockading and tree sitting were largely doing during this time,
and I don't know that's how I've seen it often
be The most effective is when it's part of a
larger campaign, whether it's a legal campaign or a public
campaign like the Atlanta Forest. I believe it's like not absolutely,
we are going to tree sit forever, it's we're also
working on this campaign to make them have to stop. Yeah. No,

(40:35):
there's there's one tactic is not going to win the
entire battle. It's you need to you need to have
you need to have more than one weapon in your arsenal,
and stuff like tree sitting and putting your body on
the line putting up barricades is just one one specific thing.
There's lots of other other avenues to resist, whether it's
like talking with neighbors around the forest, or it's blocking

(40:56):
stuff up in the courts, trying to make the trying
to make it harder to process the destruction permits, trying
to trying to lobby people in the county that may
be sympathetic to the cause. Is all of a big,
big collection of things beyond just all right. Now, I'm
going to go climb this tree. Yeah, and you know

(41:17):
what else tactic is often left out of the toolbox,
participating in consumer culture and purchasing the goods and services
that support this No, I can't do it. Well, yes,
that's right, buy more things to save the forest. Okay. Wait,

(41:38):
Or the tactic of pressing the forward fifteen button, second
button instead of bothering us about what adds you here next? No,
no direct action is too big or too small, And
that includes pressing the skip fifteen seconds forward buttet and

(41:59):
we're back. And during all this, she's also still involved
in a bunch of other stuff. Specifically, she helps defend
an abortion clinic against anti choice folks plant paranoid I believe,
which draws her a new kind of hater, one quite
familiar to the modern audience. But then in nineteen eighty nine,
she hits upon the thing that she's most famous for,

(42:20):
besides surviving an assassination attempt. Wait what, oh, yeah, you
already mentioned it at the start of the episode. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yep.
But the other things she's famous for is she starts
organizing loggers. The biggest employer in the area. The main
logging company is called Pacific Lumber, So we're gonna talk

(42:42):
about them real quick. Pacific Lumber Company, whose abbreviation is
PALCO because everything has to sound like acme weird stuff. Yeah,
it was founded in eighteen sixty three. And this is
the most surprising part of this story for me, as
someone who was very cynical and started researching this topic

(43:04):
for more than a hundred years. They were pretty chill,
like they were a family owned business. They were a
major employer in the area, and they didn't go all
evil company storetown. It was a good place to work.
There was a full pension, free health insurance for employees.
Company housing was affordable. You weren't like getting into debt

(43:27):
with your employer. By the sixties or so, children of
employees were eligible for scholarships. It was the kind of
job that your dad and your granddad had and they
were like proud of their work with Palco. And then
like and they also didn't clear cut. They worked with
a conservation society to save the Redwoods League. Anyone who's

(43:50):
at their bingo can now say weird old timey activists
who use league in their name square. Yeah, you haven't
heard league in a while. I know, I know people
have been sitting on that one. They be like, funk,
I got a shitty card. We got a lot of
we got a lot of fronts, we got a lot
of like, uh, I don't know what what's the other
what's the other terms that that people like using. Well,

(44:12):
fronts came about in like the sixties, right, Um, yeah,
huh Now I've I've heard of a few brigades, a
few fronts. Yeah, a lot of just just like just
like just like collectives and just kind of more like
like basic basic language. I think we should bring back league.
Uh League League League is kind of fun. You get

(44:35):
to wear costumes. It's it's implied in the name. Someone
there has to have a cape. Yeah, I actually don't
think you're allowed in the door. I think they have
like loner capes at the door in case you forget yours.
You know. Um, someone had to push for that because
they realized they were turning a lot of people away
and it just wasn't a good place to work. It's

(44:56):
like here's here's your complimentary COVID mask. Here is your kate, Yeah, totally,
both are required. Here, carry this tomb, don't open it.
Just walk around with this tomb for a while. And
this is your direct action utility belt. All right. That
would actually be pretty cool, that one would That would

(45:18):
be pretty sad, all right. So the Earth League needs
to start. So Pacific Lumber Palco. They they are involved
in helping create the California park system that's still around today. Sorry,
they save the Redwoods League, who they're working with, are
involved in creating the California park system, and they Save
the red Woods League is still around today. And then

(45:39):
even though in the forties and the I think post
World War two, but I'm not entirely certain, the government
started offering tax breaks to clearcutters because they are the
government and suck. Pacific Lumber continued its policy of selective
cuts that they might have always been doing. They worked
towards sustainable yields. They would like, look at the forest
and say how much wood can we take out of

(45:59):
this and have it still be a forest? Which is
what you should do. I was really surprised by this.
I was not expecting to find the good guy Lumber
company in this story. Yeah, that is interesting, and this
is like not just because I first ran this. I
read this on like articles and should on the internet
that are from the point of view of Pacific Lumber

(46:21):
or whatever. And then I also talked to the activists
who were involved, an activist who was involved during this time,
and Pacific Lumber wasn't a bad place. They weren't fucking perfect, right,
They weren't unionized. They were logging like you know, the redwoods,
but they were trying to do as sustainably as possible.
They were comparatively low profit, they were debt free, they

(46:45):
were happy, and they were still family owned and they
had no aspirations of becoming a big multinational. They were
a huge company. They owned two hundred thousand acres of timberlands.
It owned ten percent of the total redwood stands that
have ever existed, credit work credits due They weren't so bad.
But then they listed themselves on the New York Stock

(47:06):
Exchange in nineteen seventy five. Well there, yeah, uh huh.
And then in nineteen eighty five they had a hostile takeover.
And I had like, like I grew up in the
eighties and nineties and people talk about like hostile takeovers,
and they never like really understand it's just like some
weird corporate yuppie shit. But this this inevitably results in

(47:27):
them being a much, a much worse corporation. Oh yes,
but it's not. It's there's a name only right. They
get hostily taken over. The new owner is like Charles Hurwitz.
He's still alive. He's in his early eighties. Wait, let
me find his address and i'll read it live on er. Well,
I'm gonna get okay anyway, Um, there'll be a good

(47:50):
spot for that. Charles Hurwitz is the yuppies yuppy. He
ran a hedge fund was partly or maybe solely responsible
for a savings and loans crisis in the eighties that
cost taxpayers one point six billion dollars. He was known
as a corporate raider, known for his hostile takeovers. He
avoids publicity. He doesn't give interviews, but one of his

(48:11):
quotes is that he once said the golden rule was
quote he who has the gold makes the rules. Unrelated
to all of that, there's this quote I like by
anarchist folk singer Utah Phillips. That quote is the earth
isn't dying, it is being killed, and those who are
killing it have names and addresses. So true, I think

(48:34):
people are going to have to do their own research.
I'm sorry, yeah, I'm still looking through my thing. And
oh I just got a call from the iHeart. Snipers
are aimed at my PC right now, and if I
say anymore, they will ruin this computer and that will
be quite quite the inconvenience for me. Yeah. So there's

(48:55):
a whole Internet available to everyone. So due to some fuckery.
Charles Hurwitz and is holding company maxim Inc. Which basically
a spot you're just you're you're something like a super
villaid shit like maxim ink. Come on, oh man. Like
one of the things that's funny is about Earth First.
I'm now I'm gonna remember this guy's name all the
top my head. But when I was working against mountaintop

(49:15):
removal stuff, one of the guys who was like one
of the main evil people literally lived on a mountain
above a town he had poisoned twenty years earlier, and
the mounta you had to get on and off by helicopter,
and he was most famous for like punching reporters. It's
just like their cartoon villains. It's the Earth League to

(49:36):
take on maxim Inc. Yeah. In the next issue of
the Earth First Journals comic book. Yeah, they bought Pacific
Lumber even though Pacific Lumber tried not to sell to them.
And that's the problem with listing your ship on the
New York Stock Exchange. One hundred and twenty year old
family company that had focused on not fucking up the
forests while still logging was suddenly owned by someone who

(49:58):
could not give a single shit about anything other than profit.
So they start clear cutting, and they start clear cutting
like it's going out of style, and they are just
ripping through acres, getting every fucking dollar they can, and
not even in a like then we'll grow new trees
and cut them later way, which is never intelligent, because

(50:19):
any given forest can only survive being clear cut so
many times before it doesn't regrow because you've taken out
all of the biomass. But they're not going to bother
with that. They cut them down, mell them up, sell them,
and then turn everything into fucking subdivisions. To an outside observer,
this is really bad. It's really bad, not just for
the Earth, but it's bad for the communities that live there.

(50:41):
The classic Earth first slogan around this time is no
jobs on a dead planet. You can't log a clear cut, right,
you cut down all the trees, and then you're not
a logger anymore because there's nothing to fucking cut down.
And those of us who like rural life, well, there
ain't no rural life when you clear cut the forest
and build subdivisions. But for desperate loggers, it was the

(51:02):
only job they knew and it was the only job
on offer. So most of them, not all of them,
most of them kept cutting. And we'll talk more about
how she organized loggers on Wednesday. And this is not
my strongest cliffhanger I've ever done, but don't worry. There's
a bomb in the next episode. It's a bad bomb though.
Thanks Sophie Ga. Do you have anything you'd like to plug? Well,

(51:28):
I suppose if you want to hear about a story
of modern forest defense. I just wrapped up a four
part series on It could happen here about Stoptop City.
It's kind of a follow up to a whole Wich
episodes that I made back in twenty twenty two. But yeah,
that is that is current in just a few days
as of type of recording. I am, I'm heading heading

(51:49):
back to Atlanta for a week of action and well
we'll see, we'll see what comes of that. But this
is very much an ongoing, an ongoing fight. This this
isn't this isn't just stuff in like the eighties and nineties.
This stuff continues continues today. Yeah, and while when this drops, um,
that week of action will be happening, and you should
pay attention to fantast happening. Yeah, so I for anything

(52:13):
you want to plug the music in the series that
Gard did on A could Happen here was incredible. That
was there was really amazing. Uh. Rendition of Bella Chow
by the Narcissist Cookbook there was also a song by
Propaganda called Forest To check both those out and support
both those artists. Yeah you can. You can get the

(52:37):
copy of Belli Chow is available on the Narcissistic Cookbook
band camp if you want to download that for free,
and the artist suggests donating to a number of causes,
including the Atlanta solid Already fund and the go fund
me for Tortiquita's family. But yes, you can. You can
use that version of Bella Chow which is now now available.

(52:58):
There was a lot of a lot of quests to
have the copy of the song and we were able
to do able to do that in a reasonable amount
of time. And I want to plug. You can still
get old bumper stickers from Earth First that have that
are like so like yeah, they're so like nineties and shit,
and I think I actually don't know that this started

(53:19):
off as an Earth First bumper sticker or people making
fun of Earth First bumper sticker, but it's really funny.
There's a bumper sticker. This is Earth First. We'll log
the other planets later and on that note, we'll see
you on Wednesday. Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is

(53:40):
a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts on
cool Zone Media, visit our website cool Zonemedia dot com,
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